iller

Finally! Thanks. It will still be a fair amount of work for the cache owners to go through all their caches to replace HTML entity codes with the normal character i UTF-8 format but at least it is possible to get it right now. iller

You must be in navigate mode for the hint button to show up. Click the Go/Drive button (don't know how it is translated to English) when you are viewing a cache. Then you can select the cache again and see the Hint button. iller

It's always interesting with new battery technology, though it is not clear to me how much improvement NiZn really is. Regarding cold winter usage, my NiMH Generation 2 (low-discharge) batteries work just fine in -10C conditions. Especially the batteries delivered with my new Garmin Oregon 550t GPS receiver. They seem to last longer than my Varta Ready2Use 2300 mAh even though the Garmin batteries are labeled only 1900-2000 mAh. My old NiMH Generation 1 batteries (GP 2500 mAh) on the other hand doesn't work well when it is cold. iller

I can login on my Windows Mobile Device: HP iPAQ hx2490b Windows Mobile 5 Professional Pocket Internet Explorer (Bundled, unknown version) The site is almost unreadable in "One column" mode and "Default" mode but it looks ok in "Desktop" mode. Colors are off a lot (it looks like the border color is used as background) bit at least it is possible to login and look at caches. Geocaching.com Google Map is not working but I don't think it worked before the update either. I have not tried to log any finds yet. I don't think it worked before the update though. For those of you with login problems, you can try Opera Mini and/or Opera Mobile to see if it works better. iller

I am not sure exactly how to interpret the table, but I think you should read as e.g. support for "Internet Explorer 6 on Windows XP Professional Service Pack 3" ends 24 months after the next service pack releases (not likely to happen) or at the end of the product's support lifecycle, whichever comes first. If I am not mistaken, extended support for Windows XP will end in 2014. So there is probably more than 4 years of support left for IE6.

What part of our statement is rude? We are stating facts; he has 4 hides, his 4 hides are unaffected by the recent changes as far as we know, his 4 cache pages appear to look ok. However, several of our cache pages have been altered drastically due to the recent changes. Oh, I just love it when someone says something that is clearly designed to be condecending, and then claims that they are only stating facts. Get real. That's just like the street thugs who are caresul to word their threats in such a way that they cannot be proven to be threats. Oh...I never said that I was going to hurt him, I just said he might get hurt. Well, it could also be that the amount of work needed for Arse&Hemi to go through their 163 active caches and modify the html code where it is broken, is quite a lot of work and that they have a lot more reason to complain about the layout changes than someone with 4 caches that render properly with the new layout. Arse&Hemi has invested a lot of unpaid time and effort in geocaching.com with their caches and I can understand their frustration when they have to invest a lot more time and effort just because someone decided to change the layout of geocaching.com without prior notice. So yes, I think that someone with 163 active caches has a lot more reasons to complain for the amount of work they will have to put in, than someone with 4 caches. Of course, anyone regardless of the number of caches he/she has hidden, has equal right to complain about the layout issues for caches own by other users, but that is quite a different thing. iller

I always start with a map centered around my home coordinates that I pan until I find caches I want to visit. iller

Something you should be able notice directly is that there is much more white space in cache listings. But I think what really annoys some people is that their carefully crafted cache descriptions in html no longer render properly. This doesn't bother me very much since they would probably not render properly in the extremly limited html browser on my GPS device so I think they should be rewritten anyway. I am more bothered that accented characters like åäö that are used a lot in my country are getting exported as &-codes ("&" followed by a code like "auml", "ouml", followed by ";") in GPX files and my GPS cannot render this html code properly.

I think the Sweidsh guy who archived his caches on geocaching.com and listed them on opencaching.se won't want them unarchived. But how can you be sure that they won't be unarchived if the cache owner wants that? I am not so sure that the Swedish reviewers would deny such a request if e.g. Groundspeak apologized for the troubles caused by the latest update and reverted some of the changes. I think you see events like the archiving as some kind of protest, but also as some kind of evaluation of the other cache listing site. It has already gained attention in the Swedish geocaching forum on www.geocaching.se and I am sure that more will follow and move some of their caches to other sites. Personally I think it is sad that there has to be more than one geocaching site. If Groundspeak would be more friendly to its users and not treating the cache listings as their own property, I don't think there would any need for an alternative to geocaching.com. About the security issues: Is it true that this is the reason for the layout changes? Or is it just a rumour? I am still surprised that I didn't receive any information about the update prior to it happen e.g. in the newsletter, nor can I find any information about the update on the start page of geocaching.com. It would be very nice to receive some official information on the start page about the update, why it was made, what the benefits will be and how you are supposed to report issues (not everyone is reading the forum). iller

In my country Sweden, one geocacher is taking this a step further and actually archiving listings on geocaching.com and putting them on opencaching.se instead. Examples: http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...22-9d00cf61d9e3 http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_detai...0f-68a846dfcdd4 When something like this starts to happen, it can go fast.

i am having difficulty figuring out which "original geopage" you are referring to and where that map is located, i always used the one on my home page like GermanSailor said It shows if you click on "Or, search with Google Maps" on http://www.geocaching.com/seek/default.aspx I agree, it would be nice if this map centered around your home location. Additionally, sometimes there are problems if you change to "Satellite" view in the map on a cache page and it will go to the Green Lake. Of course, best would be if it would work correctly and not change location, but it would at least be better if it returned to your home location instead of Green Lake. iller

Yep, very annoying. However, using accented characters like åäö instead of th &-codes in html might be causing other problems so it is not sure that allowing them directly in html is the way to go. What this problem really shows is the lack of a simple html editor in the caching listing editor. If there was such an html editor, you would be able to write the text with proper scandinavian letters and then click on a button to create html code for it. It would also solve the problem with beginners not being able to insert images in their cache descriptions because they don't know html. Until this problem is fixed, I recommend you use an external html editor to edit your listings. Then you will also have a backup copy of your descriptions and can try out different things before you upload them to geocaching.com. Personally I use the html editor in SeaMonkey (SeaMonkey Composer, previously Mozilla Composer) and it works great for me. It generates html code that work very well in cache listings, clean and efficient code that renders properly also on GPS devices with paperless caching ability. Some people prefer the online geoching html editor on this Danish page: http://www.crumlin.dk/geocaching/html/editor/ and it seems to work fine too. However there is a really annoying bug with the new release: The generated GPX files contain strange looking &-code sequencs (& followed by auml; etc) and these files do not render properly on paperless GPS devices like Garmin Oregon!!! iller

Unfortunately I think you are absolutely right about Groundspeak not caring. And since the site they run are built almost entirely up by data created by us, the users, they may very well be digging their own grave I mean, what Groundspeak provides is really nothing more than a fancy search site. And I am very much willing to pay money for a well-working geocache search site because I understand that it costs money to run one. But what I find very difficult to accept is that Groundspeak acts like they own the data. They are almost like Gollum in LOTR, treating the cache listings as "their precious". This is wrong, has always been wrong and will always be wrong. Information wants to be free! And while we may not be able to influence what Groundspeak will do, what we can do is to remove our data from the site and upload it to an open caching listing database instead. Then maybe Groundspeak will listen. This has already started in some countries. Eg. in Sweden, Opencaching is gaining a lot of attention and if Groundspeak continue down to the road they are going, I think Opencaching will grow fast in Sweden. As for PQs, I can tell you what happened yesterday. In the morning I got a call from a friend who wanted to go out geocaching in an area where my last PQ was a bit dated. I created a new PQ, checked the check box that I wanted it to run immediately and then be deleted. Then I waited. And waited. And waited. Nothing happened and I was afraid of being late to my friend so I considered going out with my old PQ instead. As a last desperate measure, I checked the checkbox for "Saturday" and then the PQ arrived within a couple of minutes. This is just one example of PQs not working properly for real usage. A properly implemented GPX premium function would allow you to query for all geocaches in a very large area, e.g. an entire country/state, and then download the GPX file immediately after the query has completed. But I guess this would make it too easy to steal the "precious" data that Groundspeak considers their property... iller

I think you have totally missed the point here. Most people who have asked the question 'why not do the things people are asking for?' are not saying that Groundspeak should ask users exactly how they would like the layout of the site and make it that way. They are concerned that Groundspeak uses the (scarce?) development resources they have to do totally unnecessary and unwanted layout changes instead of adding functionality that is much asked for, e.g. geocaching apps for mobile phones with Android OS, Windows Mobile OS. Or make it possible to download spoiler pictures to your GPS without violating the TOU. Or add functionality to PQ:s to make them work like they should (e.g. instant instead of being delivered after a lengthy delay). That would make sense to invest development resources on. But it seems that Groundspeak is not simple interested and instead they let some (inexperienced?) developers spend a lot of resources to make unneccesary layout changes. I have just introduced geocaching to a friend. He is still surprised that users are willingly accepting to submit caches to a company that don't allow anyone to access the database. He basically thinks this is wrong and must be changed. I told him about opencaching.se that is just starting up in Sweden and he was very interested and would check it out. Today be said a very wise thing: "If we acutally allow a company to keep the database of geocaches we create, the company must be friendly to the users and not work against them in any way". Unfortunately I think that Groundspeak has forgot about this. iller

Spot on! I tried to introduce geocaching to a slightly hesitant friend who kind of liked the idea of discovering nice places with geocaching but didn't really care about GPS technology and similar stuff. It was hard for me to convince her to log her visits on the site, but when I sent her a mail with URL:s to all the caches she had found, she tried to log. I say try, because she somehow managed to log one cache but then she couldn't remember how she had done that gave up. She still hasn't come back to the site to log her finds. Maybe she will never be a real geocacher but I still think it is sad that the site was not intuitive enough to make it possible for her to log her finds. Where is the big button that says "I found this cache and want to register my find on the site!". Well it isn't. In the upper right corner there is a box called "Navigation" where you are supposed to know that you should click on "log your visit" and that this doesn't mean that you will log your visit to the web page but actually register the cache as found. I think the main problem for my friend was that the Navigation box didn't show because she had not maximized the window and she would have to scroll to see it. Changing basic stuff like this would be good things to do. Not making very strange layout changes that don't really make it easier for beginners to find their way around the site. iller

Actually I can understand that Groundspeak doesn't support IE6. IE6 is old and making things work for it can easily eat up the hours a development team is allowed to spend on a certain release. If you can update or change browser, you should. If you are not allowed to change (e.g. at work), try to get those in power to upgrade. See more here: http://www.bringdownie6.com/ iller

Since you are so unhappy with your Oregon, I will email my address to you and you can send me the Oregon for proper "disposal." I still hope the issue he was referring to is fixed. I know that these special characters are not common in English. But many kinds of special characters (for example äöåñçáè) are important in many European languages (German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, etc.). Those black spots over (or under) the letters change the meaning of the word. If this is also a problem for Oregon users and not only for cache hiders writing cache descriptions, I think this should be fixed as soon as possible. Old cache descriptions seem to be ok. These special characters are introduced when you submit a new description or edit the old description. I'm using Firefox 3.0.17 in Linux, but I think this problem is not browser related. It seems that when you read the cache pages you see these characters correctly (even in the page source), but when you edit the description these special characters appear in the edit boxes instead of the correct letters. No, the problem is still there. When downloading a GPX file, å, ä etc in the cache description are not converted to the correct character in the ISO-8859-1 character set. It can be argued that the html code in the GPX files should not contain accented characters like åäö because it might cause problems on some devices. And supporting ISO-8859-1 is only enough for USA and Western Europe anyway. So it might be a good idea to convert accented characters to &ring, ä etc in GPX files. But it has to be coordinated with GPS device manufacturers!!! Not until they have added support for displaying the correct accented character instead of the &code should the switch be made. The current change will make it very hard to read cache descriptions in any European language that uses accented characters. Since this used to work, this is simply not acceptable. iller

Since you are so unhappy with your Oregon, I will email my address to you and you can send me the Oregon for proper "disposal." So you think this is funny? Maybe you should be a bit more careful before you dismiss serious issues with how the site works for users with other languages as English as their native language. You know, one day the language of the official geocaching site might be Chinese. Then when you no longer can read the cache descriptions since they use Chinese letters only, maybe a Chinese guy will offer to take over your GPS.

Why invest a lot of time to replace the previous good layout with this ugly one? That is one thing I don't understand. I have noticed though that performance of the site seem to have improved. Is the new design a necessary evil to make it possible to move to a platform with higher performance? On the other hand, why not use the scarce resources to implement stuff that users have asked for again and again instead of making the layout worse? Like including all image links on a cache page in GPX files so that people can download spoiler images without having to scrape the site. This is something that was promised to happen back in 2006, and now it is 2010 and it hasn't happened. Other much sought for stuff are an Android app, a windows mobile app, a better java app than GCLive etc etc. iller

Actually this problem seems to be much more severe than just making it difficult to change the cache description. It also seems to affect the way accented characters like åäöÅÄÖare exported in GPX files and PQs for cache descriptions in HTML. I am quite sure that no matter if the cache description used the accented characters åäöÅ or the equivalent codes ä, å, ö etc, they used to be converted to åäö when exported to the GPX file. That worked fine since the Garmin GPS I used could render these characters properly. But now the GPX files have started to contain the codes like ä etc and my GPS (Garmin Oregon 550t with latest software) doesn't now how to convert these codes to proper characters. So the cache descriptions are more or less useless for a large number of caches in my GPS now. This is an actual example from one the closest caches to home: Even if you know Swedish, it is very difficult to read to the text. So much for my newly bought Oregon 550t that I intended to use for paperless geocaching in the weekend. I guess I have to go back to print out the cache descriptions again. iller

With the newest firmware for Nüvi 500/550 that was released just before Christmas (version 3.50), the two serious Geocaching bugs are fixed. Upgrade at once if you use the geocaching mode! The device no longer turns off when pressing the "More" button the read the description of some caches with long names. And the device doesn't hang when you tried to read the description for some caches with complicated html code. The geocaching mode works pretty well on Nüvi 500/550 now. iller

simple short words site:forums.Groundspeak.com. You just got to love google. Jim Thank you for the tip! I didn't think of this even though I have used the technique earlier on other forums. It is amazing how much you forget.

Maybe this is a stupid question, but how do I search for phrases consisting of short words only, e.g. "Nuvi 500". All I get back is "too short search term". iller

Thanks for the tip about %smart=20. It solved the problem for caches with long names causing the device to shut down. Unfortunately I have discovered another problem relating to geocaching. Sometimes the device hangs when trying to display the cache description. Example: GC16YJ8 (Swerail #01 - Göteborg). When the device hangs like this the only that works to get it back up again is to remove the battery or to hold the power button pressed for a couple of seconds to reset the device. How should I report this problem to Garmin in the best way? I have tried their online e-mail form before without getting any answer. And the local Garmin support in my country (Sweden) only have a telephone number for support and I don't think it is fruitful to try to explain this problem over the phone. Apart from the obvious bugs in geocaching mode I don't find the geocaching features of Nuvi 500 to be very well thought through anyway. There is no way to set for what zoom mode geocaches should be visible which means that the map will be full of geocaching icons everywhere if you load a Pocket Query on the device. It is not possible to point on a geocache and get its description (except when in Boating/Marine mode). Geocaches seems to share space with other waypoints which severely limits how many geocaches you can load on the device. Etc etc... I have loaded my geocaches on Nuvi 500 as POIs and use it only as an information library. This way I can keep information about several thousand geocaches (incl. pictures) on my Nuvi 500. I use my eTrex Vista HCx for the actual navigating to the geocaches. iller

GCzII